Posts in July, 2007

It appears that all the domain names have been taken - 90% of them by crappy domain name sitting companies. This really ticks me off because I have an idea for an Ajaxy Web 2.0 type site that will make me obscenely wealthy, until the next bubble bursts. Naturally I can't give out details of the site I have in mind, suffice to say it is on the subject of debating. So I would love to get a simple, catchy domain, that says debating, arguing, duscusion or similar. If anyone can suggest such a domain that isn't taken, I would be happy to give you 100 shares when I float on the stock market. And if you are thinking of reserving said domain name and selling it to me, be aware that I have no money - at least until I get venture capital.continue reading…

I have many ideas in the course of any given day. They are dredged up from the depths of my subconscious and placed on my mental in-tray, to be sorted in to mental heaps. Most are placed on to the "that'll never work" heap, others are thrown on the "better not, that's probably illegal" heap or the "plutonium isn't available at every corner drug store you know" heap. Occasionally though, some make it to my mental out-tray.continue reading…

I pride myself in my ability to make decisions. If I have all the variables and criteria then I can typically select the best course of action, or at least a good choice of action. As an engineer, this is invaluable because most problems in software development are of this type; you have all the facts and a desired outcome. If you meet the desired outcome, then you can safely say that you made the right decision. If not you can go back and try again.continue reading…

The consequence of this tale of woe is that I have released Food File as open source, so that I can collect on karma rather than hard cash. The source and Win32 installer is now available on Google Code, so those nice folks at Google can pick up the bandwidth bill. I hear they are not short of a few cents.continue reading…

Just uploaded a new version of Postmarkup (1.0.5), my bbcode parsing engine. The only significant change was a fix to a potential thread safety issue. It would only have occurred if you used the [list] tag, and even then only rarely (if at all). I figured it would be worthwhile since many people are using it in the context of a multi-threaded web application.

I decided not to bother with a win32 installer since its only a single Python file, and can be installed with easy_install. Use the following command line to install, or upgrade, Postmarkup.

After my previous post regarding the the is_power_of_2 and next_power_of_2 functions, Richard Jones pointed out that Pyglet has an implementation that used the bit-twiddling method. Since I had something to do a direct comparison with, I wrote a script to test the run time of the two methods.

This produced the following results on my humble PC.

The results are conclusive - bit-twiddling is still a big win in Python. I figured that the bit-twiddling is_power_of_2 function would be faster than the float math version, but I was surprised by the next_power_of_2 result. It pays to profile!